@spendius,
It is a well known literary theory, although it is far more widely applicable than just to literature, that once the cheap, mass produced book came into being it was the ladies who were by far the most avid consumers of them. Firstly cheap to ladies of position and latterly to ladies of every stamp and condition.
Why that is is hardly a mystery so there's no need for me to mention the subject here before an audience of well-read and well-educated ladies and gentlemen such as Lola has gathered into this startlingly well-appointed and well-supplied coffee shop. Were a grande piano wanted it is just there on one whistle. We can change the ashtrays from tin to onyx with a flip of the fingertip can't we girls.
So it was quite natural to expect that publishers and authors would compete in this market using more and more extravagance regarding the estimable nature of the female sex, as is commonplace now with TV ads when ladies do the shopping for much more than books. The result was that ladies completely lost sight of what men think of them and think that men think of them the way they think of themselves and that it is perfectly natural and right that it should be so.
In the good name of Art, Jane Austen exposed those authors and publishers as nothing but sellers of wood pulp and intimated, in as understated a way as it is possible to be, that such a process would come to no good.
When one considers that some chap somewhere nowhere has only to bang his wife with a warming pan, her having driven him past his cut-off point, and what a toodo, and millions of men have died young and been maimed trying to bring women a better way of life, and have not done so bad either, it is a theory that might get some funding if it wasn't for ladies and chaps who think of women as women think of themselves blocking it.
Without this 300 years of romantic flim-flam I should think our ladies would bow every time they meet a man or pass one in the street.
As it is bathrooms are cluttered up with all manner of chemical substances of various colours and viscosities , a plumber I know counted over 200 in one bathroom, and the ear wax remover is discreetly placed behind an orange, flat bottomed container of some unguent said to smooth out scrawny neck tissue and crow's feet.
Laughter lines as well I suppose.
